Pixar’s Lightyear: Exec Reveals “What Went Wrong” With Spinoff

Last year Disney-Pixar released a surprising movie, Lightyear, a spin-off of the Toy Story franchise that…took a lot of explaining to make it make sense. The movie wasn’t a Toy Story 5 and it wasn’t a Toy Story prequel, it was a movie that the Buzz Lightyear toy was based on, as in a movie within the movies. This angle for the movie seemed to be very confusing for some audience members, perhaps leading in part to the film not really meeting box office expectations. With a reported budget of $200 million, the film made $218 million globally, with just $118 million of that coming from domestic theaters. Even critically the traditional darling Pixar saw good, but not great, reviews. So what happened?

Speaking with TheWrap in a new interview, Pixar CCO Pete Docter was asked about the film not meeting their expectations, revealing that the team at the animation studio has been interrogating it internally. “We’ve done a lot of soul-searching about that because we all love the movie. We love the characters and the premise. I think probably what we’ve ended on in terms of what went wrong is that we asked too much of the audience. When they hear Buzz, they’re like, great, where’s Mr. Potato Head and Woody and Rex? And then we drop them into this science fiction film that they’re like, What?”

He continues, “Even if they’ve read the material in press, it was just a little too distant, both in concept, and I think in the way that characters were drawn, that they were portrayed. It was much more of a science fiction. And Angus (MacLane, director), to his credit, took it very seriously and genuinely and wanted to represent those characters as real characters. But the characters in ‘Toy Story’ are much broader, and so I think there was a disconnect between what people wanted/expected and what we were giving to them.”

To make it clear how much Disney and Pixar are already pivoting away from the failure of Lightyear, Toy Story 5 was unceremoniously announced during an investor phone call by CEO Bob Iger. The former Disney leader was notorious for greenlight sequels and remakes during his original tenure, so that multiple hit sequels were announced as soon as he was back in the top seat.